[beat]

The problem with Kavanaugh isn't what he did as a drunken teenager. It's what he did as a sober adult - his angry, petulant outbursts at senators. A Supreme Court seat isn't just a question of experience or background. It's a question of temperament. Even if he was completely innocent (and being too drunk to remember or too arrogant to think it important isn't the same as innocent), he should have been completely calm and peaceful with the senators.

Think of it another way - it's a job interview. If you were crying and screaming about a conspiracy of your interviewers, would you get hired for any other job?

The GOP should have pulled him and put forward another candidate, one without that controversy. They've managed to find such candidates before. The resemblance of the Kavanaugh vote to a bunch of men having their way with women and covering their mouths while they screamed was unsettling.

[moduspol]

Again: It is now objective fact that at least four of his accusers were lying, so we're legitimately evaluating how someone should react when being questioned surrounding false sexual assault and rape allegations after being in the media spotlight for weeks.

Many of these senators opposed his nomination prior to his name even being selected, yet you're expecting him to sit back non-chalantly as senators try to trick him into acknowledging maybe he was just too drunk to remember the raping. Him getting a little testy after weeks of the most intense character assassination I've ever seen is not unreasonable.

> Think of it another way - it's a job interview. If you were crying and screaming about a conspiracy of your interviewers, would you get hired for any other job?

This isn't a job interview, and again: at least four objectively false accusers. If there wasn't any planning involved, then at least four people acted independently to make very conveniently timed false accusations. Both conclusions seem implausible to me, yet logically one must be true.

> The GOP should have pulled him and put forward another candidate, one without that controversy.

It is now political reality that if the stakes are high enough, especially on the Republican side, you can expect false sexual assault allegations. Again: this is factual. It happened here, and it can happen again.

Dropping candidates due to "controversy" stemming directly from uncorroborated sexual assault allegations would only give more power to false accusers. Maybe we can come up with a standard of how we expect people to respond when the mainstream media and political left are openly labeling you as a "potential gang rapist" for weeks, but until then, I can only judge him based on how I'd expect a potential SC justice (and human being) to act in such a difficult situation.

[nebulous1]

I don't think they should have dropped him for simply being controversial.

That said, which four have been shown to be lying? Only Munro-Leighton has admitted lying outright, and Swetnick changed her statement enough that you could say she was lying too. And Munro-Leighton admitted she wasn't actually the original Jane Doe accuser anyway.

I do believe something happened with Blasey Ford, although ultimately I don't know if her memory of the events will fully gel with what happened, or with what Kavanagh thought was happening at the time.

Yes, I would have expected him to keep his cool even under such intense pressure. I wouldn't expect you or I would be able to do so, but I wouldn't put either of us forward for a lifetime position on the US supreme court either.

Ignoring his composure, a bigger issue for me is that he outright lied about his drinking at the time and the meaning of many phrases used in his yearbook. Renate Alumnus just meant they were all good friends? Boof is farting and devils triangle is a drinking game? These are simply lies, and not even good ones. I don't think the existence of lewd comments in his yearbook is disqualifying, but lying about them should be.

[moduspol]

> That said, which four have been shown to be lying?

I posted a separate source for each of the four above. The two you're missing are the "rape on a boat" allegation and the woman who initially corroborated Ford's allegation on Facebook before backtracking after questions arose.

Keep in mind that at the time, the pressure was on to just drop him as a mere result of a large number of allegations. These allegations weren't intended to stand up to scrutiny--just to mount political pressure to drop him.

> I do believe something happened with Blasey Ford, although ultimately I don't know if her memory of the events will fully gel with what happened, or with what Kavanagh thought was happening at the time.

Agreed.

> Yes, I would have expected him to keep his cool even under such intense pressure.

I think he was in a no-win situation. If he had kept his cool, he would have appeared inhumanly cold. It would have been spun as him being uncaring and confident he's getting away with his sexual assaults.

That's kind of why I find this so disgusting, though. This is essentially the "new normal" of high-stakes politics. You're going to be put under a microscope as we hang "potential gang rapist" around your neck for weeks, and then win or lose, we'll move onto the next news cycle without even acknowledging how explicit this character assassination was, or the effect on future nominations.

And there will still be people who don't see this as reprehensible.

> Boof is farting and devils triangle is a drinking game?

Devil's triangle did end up being a drinking game, though [1]. It's not even weird or unexpected that high school boys would name a game after an explicit sexual act.

That the rest are being grouped in under "presumed lies" isn't fair, either, and the fact that this stuff is even being discussed is more an indictment of this circus of a process than the judge. We can expect future candidates to keep as many secrets as possible, be as vague as possible in answers, and we're all worse off for it.

[1] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/devils-triangle-drin...

[nebulous1]

I didn't know about the boat allegations.

I agree that a lot of the main stream media, and particularly social media, can whip up a shitstorm over unfounded allegations.

However, the root of the allegations against Kavanaugh did have merit, as in they deserved to be looked into. After they were made a number of other allegations were made with less merit, or outright lies. However, just as there's an issue with rushing to judgement when a number of allegations are made, there's also an issue of letting unfounded allegations cast doubt on other allegations.

The mere existence of unfounded or fabricated allegations shouldn't negatively impact on different allegations, just as the existence of an uninvestigated allegation shouldn't discount him as a candidate. If either or these thing were true it would be too easy to either destroy a candidate or invalidate all allegations against them.

Although a number of anonymous allegations shouldn't mean anything, I think you'd agree that if 10 Blasey Fords came forward with similar stories that would be a big problem. Obviously this is counter-factual, I'm not talking about Kavanaugh only how these situations can be dealt with in the future. I agree that this can get out of hand, but I can't see an alternative. Ignoring Blasey Ford did not seem like a viable option.

Regarding future candidates being vague, this could just be rejected. I don't have an issue with the path to the SC being a difficult and fairly grueling process.

To my eyes the Democrats severely wounded their stance by waiting until the last moment before revealing Blasey Ford. The Republicans lost it during the post Ford Kavanaugh questioning, choosing to grandstand instead of letting the prosecutor they'd specially brought in continue. Both of them fairly disgraced themselves. And let's not forget that the only reason this didn't happen with Garland is because the Republicans abused their power to avoid even having a hearing.

[beat]

"Objectively false".

I don't think that word means what you think it means.

[moduspol]

> objective - (of a person or their judgment) not influenced by personal feelings or opinions in considering and representing facts: historians try to be objective and impartial.

It does mean what I think it means, actually.